The Suicide Squad anime continues Japan’s history of making American superhero stories better

polygon.com:

The more you think about it, the more Suicide Squad Isekai makes sense. In the new anime from Wit Studio currently streaming in the US on Max and Hulu, some of DC Comics’ most famous baddies, including Harley Quinn, Clayface, Deadshot, Peacemaker, and King Shark, are thrown into an isekai world of knights, magic, and dragons. As you might expect, the effect is immediately humorous. But it also works in ways that may not seem immediately obvious. Unless, of course, you’re already familiar with Batman: Gotham Knight, because there is a clear path of lessons learned, analyzed, and improved on between that 2008 American-Japanese co-production and Suicide Squad Isekai. And along that path, one might find more examples of Japan improving American superhero stories. Let’s back up a little.

Isekai anime is typically about characters from the modern world being transported into a land of magic. In shows like The Rising of the Shield Hero or Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, this results in disruptive violence stemming from the protagonists’ modern sense of morality or some talent or inclination that was useless in their previous life but which proves surprisingly handy in fantasy settings. The genre’s foundation is a clash of worlds and ideas that results in chaos.

And that entire premise evidently works incredibly well when the protagonists are superpowered scoundrels, especially well-established ones. The villainous cast of Suicide Squad Isekai can immediately get into the bloody heart of the genre by raining down fire, death, and destruction on a fantastical world of orcs and werewolves, not for any gratuitous reasons, but because that is simply their nature, as introduced and explored in other properties. At the same time, director Eri Osada together with writers Tappei Nagatsuki and Eiji Umehara do an excellent job introducing Harley and the gang to viewers who might be seeing them for the first time. They especially nail down their abrasive personalities that